Gieger

by Gustaf Skördeman

She’d sat down on a splinter of violin that was cutting into her backside, but she didn’t feel able to move.

  Let it hurt, she thought to herself. That way I know I’m alive.

  After half an hour, both the kids returned home. They complained because it was so dark. Olle settled down on the sofa and turned on the TV. Sara turned it off. Ebba came in with a plastic carrier bag from a convenience store and pulled out a large bag of crisps and a big bottle of cola. Hung over, Sara thought to herself, and let her be.

  ‘So, what is it?’ said Olle. ‘Why did we need to come home?’

  ‘So that we can spend some time together. Ebba might be moving out soon, and then we won’t be able to hang out together very often.’

  ‘Great. Can I have her room, then? You can sit there in your one-bed flat in Tumba,’ said Olle, smirking at his sister.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with Tumba,’ said Sara, feeling overly politically correct.

  Dear God, she had inner city kids. Maybe she should have taken her kids to see Jane in the suburbs more often. They were now both at an age where her admonitions effectively had the reverse effect.

  ‘I’m getting a flat on Södermalm. Dad said so.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘We’ve already been to view it. It’s at Mosebacke.’

  Jesus Christ, Martin. A flat . . .

  ‘What do I get, then?’ said Olle.

  ‘You can have a new mobile,’ said Ebba, smirking back at Olle.

  She saw the words had an effect. Siblings knew which buttons to push in each other, Sara thought to herself. She’d never had a sibling – just Lotta and Malin, whom she would never have dared be mean to, out of fear that she’d be excluded. There was a security to being able to be mean to each other while still knowing you’d always have the other person there.

  ‘If she gets one, then I should get one too!’ said Olle, looking at his mother.

  ‘You don’t just get a flat,’ said Sara.

  ‘Why not?’ said Ebba. ‘Dad promised. I need somewhere to live, after all.’

  ‘But that costs millions of kronor. You don’t get that.’

  ‘Why not? We’ve got money. It’s like a poor family giving their daughter a tent for a hundred kronor.’

  ‘Listen to yourself!’

  ‘But relatively. Three million isn’t much for Dad.’

  ‘Six million, because I need one, too,’ said Olle.

  ‘What’s wrong with you? What sort of upbringing have we given you?’

  ‘None whatsoever,’ said Ebba, stuffing a fistful of crisps in her mouth.

  The words stung.

  ‘I’ve got a very guilty conscience over the fact that I’ve worked so many late evenings and nights, but can’t we try and make up for lost ground now? I can work less. You’ll soon be a grown-up, and then it’ll be too late.’

  ‘So what are we going to do then? Go to the kids’ museum at Junibacken?’

  ‘Go out for a meal?’ Sara suggested.

  They weren’t children any longer, even if they were her children, and going to a restaurant sounded appropriately grown-up.

  ‘There’s no point,’ said Olle. ‘It’ll never happen.’

  She sighed. But she didn’t have much to offer by way of counter-arguments.

  ‘Why don’t we just talk?’ said Sara. ‘I know I’ve been gone a lot, but do you remember how proud you were when you were little about the fact that your mum was a police officer? Aren’t you proud anymore?’

  ‘Well, how much fun do you think it is to hear that your own mum works on Malmskillnadsgatan?’ said Olle.

  ‘What? Who says that? People at school?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They’re just trying to be funny,’ Ebba said in a tired voice. ‘They know you’re a police officer, but that you work on Malmskillnadsgatan. Like the whores.’

  ‘Don’t say whores! It’s a bloody horrible word. And tell those idiots at school that this is a real damn job. I’m trying to help girls that no one else cares about. They’re subjected to dreadful things.’

  ‘Yes, yes . . .’

  ‘Surely there are other people who can help,’ said Olle. ‘Who don’t have kids.’

  ‘Yes. But right now I’m trying to find the person who murdered Uncle Stellan, too.’

  ‘Why? He was rotten.’

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘Grandma. He thought she was worthless because she was a cleaner.’

  ‘Did she say that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But they took care of her.’

  ‘What do you mean, “took care of”?’

  ‘Mum escaped from Poland. Surely I’ve told you that – don’t you remember?’

  ‘You’ve started to tell us lots of times, but then you’ve always had something else important to do. Why did she escape?’

  ‘It was a dictatorship. And she didn’t want to live there. She’d got pregnant with me and my father didn’t want to know about it. Her own family rejected her and the communists thought she was immoral. They wanted to take me away from her and put her in an institution, so she fled. And when she got here, she had no money and didn’t know anyone. Stellan and Agneta needed a housekeeper and placed an advertisement. Someone in social services spotted it and wanted to help Mum out.’

  ‘Is that right?’ said Olle, putting his hand in the pocket of his hoodie.

  ‘No mobiles,’ said Sara.

  Olle pushed the phone back into his pocket again. It couldn’t be any clearer that the story didn’t exactly engage a fourteen-year-old.

  ‘I’m sorry we haven’t talked about this sooner, but remember it sometimes. You have it so good – a secure family, an amazing home, no money worries. But your grandmother fled a dictatorship without a penny to her name. And she cleaned 24/7 to provide for herself and her daughter. Because she wanted me to have a better life than her.’

  ‘Don’t you want us to have a better life, too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So let Dad give me that flat then.’

  Open goal.

  ‘That’s not the same.’

  ‘Surely it is.’

  ‘Were you ashamed?’ said Olle.

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘That Grandma was a cleaner.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Cleaning woman.

  Suddenly an old quote from a movie cropped up in Sara’s head. Why?

  Cleaning woman! Cleaning woman!

  A memory emerged. Sara and Malin and Lotta were sitting there screeching Cleaning woman! And then they threw rubbish on the floor where Jane had just cleaned. And when she picked it up, they threw rubbish somewhere else that she’d also cleaned. And called for Jane.

  Cleaning woman! Cleaning woman!

  And her mother had come and cleaned again.

  And all the girls had laughed.

  Sara hadn’t thought about it since then. Not once. Effective self-censorship. And so far as she could remember, Jane had never spoken about it. She’d never reproached her daughter. She could have yelled at her, forbidden her from playing with the sisters. In fact, she should have told her off and stopped her from seeing them.

  Why didn’t she say anything?

  Did she think that Sara would tell Stellan and Agneta? Had she started to count her own daughter among the masters of the house? She’d definitely acted that way, if Sara was honest.

  There was something about Jane, it occurred to her. What was it? Something that didn’t make sense.

  Jane and childhood . . .

  Exactly.

  Sara looked at her two children. Ebba was yawning and Olle was absorbed by a game on his mobile.

  ‘Look, you two, there’s no need for you to sit here with me. I’ll have to work less, and we’ll have to try and use the summer to hang out together some more.’

  Relieved, the children went to their rooms.

  Sara watched them go, and then surveyed the living room. The hut in the Bromans’ garden that
she and Jane had lived in would have fitted into this room several times over. She noted that her own children had ended up with a better life than she had. Just like Sara’s mother had given her daughter a better life.

  She pulled out her mobile, checked her recent calls and hit redial.

  ‘Yes?’ said Jane in a slightly irritable tone – as if Sara was disturbing her. Her mother had some rather particular telephone habits.

  ‘What was he like?’ said Sara.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Stellan. What was he like?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘To you. Olle said that you’d said he was mean to you.’

  ‘Well, there’s mean and then there’s mean . . .’

  ‘Was he?’

  ‘He had so much on his plate. I suppose he didn’t have the energy to be pleasant to a cleaner.’

  ‘But what about all his talk about solidarity with the workers?’

  ‘I never heard anything like that. I suppose he didn’t want to disturb me while I was cleaning and doing the laundry and cooking.’

  ‘And what about Agneta?’

  ‘Well, what can I say? I don’t think she had it easy being married to someone like that.’

  ‘Was she unpleasant to you?’

  ‘She wasn’t very . . . warm. A bit harsh. It sometimes felt like she would force me to clean in the evenings so that I couldn’t spend time with you. I don’t know why. She had two daughters of her own, so she had no cause to be jealous.’

  ‘Why did you stay?’

  ‘You were so attached to the girls.’

  ‘It was for my sake?’

  ‘Yes. And you must remember how angry you were when we moved.’

  ‘But I didn’t know then how they’d treated you, or what Stellan did to girls. But you knew that.’

  ‘I didn’t know. I suspected. And I didn’t want to soil your young world with ideas like that – I wanted to protect you from even having to know about those kinds of things.’

  Just like she had tried to protect her own children from what she saw in the line of duty, Sara thought to herself. She had more in common with her mother than she had been willing to recognise.

  ‘I was so angry at you for so many years . . . I behaved like a spoiled brat. You’ve done so much for me and I’ll always be grateful for that, but it’s awful that the swine managed to die before the truth came out. You should have said something when I was an adult.’

  ‘Yes, yes. I made a mistake. It’s not easy.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to give you a guilty conscience. And I understand this is hard to talk about. But I’ve got a question – something I’m ashamed to ask.’

  ‘There’s no need to be.’

  ‘Yes, there is. Do you remember how Lotta and Malin used to drop rubbish just after you’d cleaned. And how I latched on to them?’

  ‘It was always rowdy with two kids in the house. Three, including you.’

  ‘But we did this intentionally. As soon as you were done in one room, we would go in and mess it up. And then we’d call for you. “Cleaning woman.” Do you remember that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I want to apologise for it anyway. It was an awful thing to do.’

  ‘I was just glad you were playing so nicely with the girls.’

  ‘So you do remember?’

  ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t matter now.’

  ‘Mum . . .’

  ‘How are things with you, then?’

  Talking about emotions wasn’t Jane’s thing.

  ‘Good. Listen, I found something. I’ve just watched loads of home movies at the Bromans’. Not only the disgusting ones of the rapes, but the ones from their trips and parties and of general family life. And photo albums, too. And I saw one from when you’d just started at the Bromans’, but the year was wrong. You were pregnant when you fled Poland, right?’

  ‘Yes, by an unpleasant man – I didn’t want you to grow up with him.’

  ‘But the album is from 1972. And I was born in ’75.’

  ‘It must be wrong.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. The old king was visible in a newspaper. And he died in ’73 – I’ve checked. Did you come here in 1972?’

  There was silence on the line.

  ‘Mum?’

  No answer.

  When Sara pushed the phone to her ear, she could hear her mother crying.

  ‘Mum,’ she said quietly. ‘What’s the matter?’

  Jane sobbed, then she whispered, ‘Sorry . . .’

  ‘For what?’

  No answer.

  ‘What does it matter which year you arrived? Except that you weren’t pregnant when you fled . . .’ Sara stopped herself. ‘That happened in Sweden . . .’

  The realisation hit her like a goods trains ramming a caravan. Total destruction. Everything beyond repair.

  Jane had fallen pregnant in Sweden. If she arrived in 1972, then she had only been sixteen years old.

  To Stellan’s tastes.

  ‘Mum . . .’ said Sara.

  ‘What was I supposed to do? I was afraid they’d send me home.’

  ‘You were just sixteen.’

  ‘He stopped when I got pregnant. You say that I saved you, but you saved me first, Sara. When you came into the world, he stopped.’

  ‘But then Stellan was my . . .’

  Sara could hear Jane crying on the phone as if through a thick, stifling mist.

  ‘Sorry . . .’ she said in a faint voice. ‘Sorry.’

  But Sara couldn’t understand.

  Sorry.

  For giving her a father.

  No. For giving her that father.

  50

  Life – her real life – had begun the day Lidiya’s mother had told her about her father.

  What had happened to him, and who had done it.

  The party and its functionaries.

  In the name of the global revolution.

  They had knocked on the door at half past four in the morning, told him that he was under arrest and dragged him away.

  Much later on, her mother had found out that he had spent three weeks in an ice-cold cell. Constantly hungry, with no blanket to warm him or mattress to sleep on. And then a trial. Lasting all of twenty minutes, and consisting largely of a list of accusations.

  He was convicted of opposition to the Soviet state, in accordance with article 58 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic. Then he was taken away and executed. His body was cast into a mass grave with others from the purge.

  One of many purges.

  Her father had always been loyal to the revolution. Dedicated. He had preached its necessity and positive impact on the country. But he had wanted to discuss methods of production and collective ownership. He wasn’t opposed to them – he merely posed questions. For reasons of pure agricultural romanticism. But Ilya Petrovsky, who bore a grudge against Viktor Andreyev, didn’t hesitate to report him.

  All of this was told to Lidiya.

  Ilya Petrovsky had recounted the course of events to Lidiya’s mother with ill-concealed delight, and she had told it to Lidiya.

  And her mother had withheld no details.

  She wanted her daughter to know exactly what had happened. Who was guilty. She even told her that Ilya Petrovsky had offered her his bed. That had cost him an eye.

  Lidiya remembered asking her mother what she could do to punish the men who had killed her father.

  ‘Become one of them,’ her mother said.

  Lidiya thought she had misheard, but her mother repeated it. She looked her straight in the eye and nodded.

  ‘Become one of them.

  ‘Get them to trust you. Learn everything you can. Let the years pass. Become trusted. Advance. And then, at a critical moment, exact revenge. Strike as hard as you can against the entire system.

  ‘But a little girl can do nothing. You must train. You must become resilient. Start by becoming the
best. Get their attention. Never rest.

  ‘Praise the party above all else. Proclaim its might with each waking second.

  ‘Ensure your eyes are radiant when you talk of Comrade Khrushchev, about the Soviet system, about the Pioneers’ tributes to the working masses and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Praise the heroes from the great war for the Motherland. Learn the names of all the fallen generals. Do not learn the names of those who ended up in disgrace and were brought to justice under the great Stalin.

  ‘Ensure you change your views at the very moment the party does. Report comrades who do not do their best, or who doubt the overarching Soviet system. Identify friends who may be receptive to counter-revolutionary propaganda, and watch them closely. You need enemies, not friends, so that you personally appear reliable.

  ‘They must never find the slightest crack in your facade.

  ‘You must believe it yourself.

  ‘Conceal the truth in a small compartment deep down that you can bury under all the layers. Not in your heart – a heart can always be prised open.

  ‘Hide it at the very back of your mind, behind the secrets that you are most ashamed of. The ones you would never tell anyone. Behind all the shame and guilt that you carry, all the things you would rather die than tell to anyone. A small, hard kernel of truth.’

  And Lidiya – or Agneta – had committed her life to crushing the system by first becoming a trusted part of it. She had become Desirée. She had played her role so well that she had been entrusted with the Union’s most secret and important missions. She had accomplished them to the best of her ability while waiting for the right moment.

  The person who was to become Agneta Öman had been trained to spread devastation, to dissimulate, to deceive. To intrigue, to analyse and attack the weakest points. Knowledge she had assimilated in the hope of one day avenging her father’s death.

  And she had been an exemplary pupil.

  51

  The apartment was dark now. Deafeningly silent.

  Sara had been sitting there, completely immobile, for hours.

  The truth had shaken her to her very foundations. Changed everything. She was another person now.

  Why had she dug into this?

  Why did she always need to find the truth?

  What was she supposed to do now?

  Who was she?

  Stellan Broman was her father.